The Spine (2009)

Director:

Chris Landreth

Genre:

Animation | Short

Cast

Gordon Pinsent	...	Dan Rutherford
rest of cast listed alphabetically:
Patrice Goodman	...	Angela
Robert McCarrol	...	Francis
Alberta Watson	...	Mary Rutherford

Runtime:

Canada:11 min

Country:

Canada

Language:

English

Color:

Color

Company:

Copperheart Animation

on the edge

It takes breathing, it takes reflection, to assume and finally understand that a film as this is a part of you. You see, short films that are as effective and powerful as this one are necessarily hard punches in the stomach. And indeed this is a powerful film. So in this case, it took me 10 days, during which i watched very few movies, to see which parts of me were shaken by the film. And indeed, i had 10 uneasy challenging days.

I didn't know the filmmaker, this is my first experience with his work. I'll want to see what he did before. This film does something that i hadn't seen done this way before. Now that i saw it, it seems incomprehensible how it hadn't been tried before. This is a kind of Philip Dick meets Gondry meets Jonze, both of which share the fact of having worked with Kaufman. Animation, in the sensitive way Landreth works, seems an incredibly interesting medium to work with these themes, basically voyages between vessels of inconscience. A constant instability that won't allow us to know where we stand, which level of consciousness are we visiting. The whole film is a no man land, an uncharted territory to obscure parts of self.

Every emotion is perfectly controlled, the construction is tight and perfectly balanced, and played around poles of madness, depression, love, frustration. Life.

The visual accomplishment is huge. The camera is grounded on our real world, but the images, though springing from this same world, were visualized elsewhere, in the tiny space between being awaken, and deeply sleeping. I'll want to see this film again.

My opinion: 4/5

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